106 4 Patterns of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century

106 4 Patterns of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century Ireland Patrick Walsh Cíos rí, cíos tire, cíos cléire, cíos sróna, cíos tóna, cíos téite, airgead ceann igceanngach féile, airgead teallaigh is bealaigh do réiteach King’s tax, land tax and clerical tax, a nose tax, an arse tax and a heating tax, a poll tax at the end of each gale, hearth money and money for repairing roads1 This verse composed as part of a poem written in Irish in 1697 offers a striking contemporary commentary on the impact of taxation in Ireland in the decade after the 1688–91 Williamite-Jacobite War. The poet, one Seán Ó’Gadhra, describes the variety of taxes imposed by national, local, and clerical authorities while adding in some further fantastical imposts to convey his sense of the cumulative impact of these assessments. Obviously there was no cíos sróna, let alone a cíos tóna, but the implication here is that the number and variety of taxes was increasing and merited commentary in a poem which more generally offered a damning indictment of the Williamite state in Ireland and the nascent Protestant Ascendancy which controlled it. Such commentaries on taxation in the Irish language sources are rare making this an especially valuable source, revealing as it does some insight into popular attitudes to taxation, attitudes that were rarely verbalised in the surviving documentation. Instead historians have been largely obliged to infer popular attitudes to taxation from instances of illicit distillation, protest, riot, or smuggling.2 More broadly these lines raise a number of useful questions for the historian. What taxes were levied on the Irish population in this period and by whom? How was the burden of taxation spread across society and how did popular resistance shape the distribution and typologies of Irish taxation? This chapter seeks to address these subjects through an analysis of 107 the patterns of Irish taxation in the period from the Williamite wars to the Act of Union. It is concerned with ascertaining what was the burden of taxation in eighteenth-century Ireland, how was it borne, by whom, and where. Finally this analysis of the political economy of Irish taxation and the geographies of fiscal extraction is situated, throughout the chapter, within a comparative context looking at both England and Scotland.3 The Components of Irish Taxation Structurally, Irish taxation superficially resembled the contemporary English and Scottish models. All had their origins in the fiscal politics of the Cromwellian era and the subsequent adaptation and expansion of Commonwealth innovations by the Restoration regimes in Dublin, London, and Edinburgh in the early 1660s.4 There were three main components of Irish taxation: customs duties, excise duties, and property taxes in the form of hearth money and quit rents— charges on estates formerly forfeited to the Crown during the turbulent sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Ó’Gadhra’s poem reminds us there were other elements within the Irish taxation landscape in this period, most notably tithes paid to the Anglican clergy, and charges levied at county and parish level. Each of these categories of taxation caused significant friction at local level. Tithes payable to the minority but established Church of Ireland were a grievance for Presbyterians and Catholics alike and they played a significant role in fuelling agrarian disorder from the 1760s through to the 1830s.5 County cess—‘money for repairing roads’—and the increasing demands of county grand juries in south Ulster in the 1760s, meanwhile, contributed to the Hearts of Oak and Steel Boy protests of the late 1760s and 1770s.6 Like English turnpike riots they are both part of the wider politics of taxation and also distinct phenomena and have thus been left out of the analysis that follows.7 108 Returning to the key components of national taxation—customs, excise, and property taxes—Figure 4.1 presents their relative weighting across the period under discussion in visual form while Table 4.8 (see appendix) provides figures for each category of taxation at decennial intervals from 1695 through to 1795. By 1795 the structure of Irish taxation had changed significantly thanks to the passage of the 1793 Consolidated Fund Act, which heavily revised the Restoration legislation by ending the division between hereditary and additional duties, making comparisons with earlier periods trickier.8 Figure 4.1: The Main Components of Taxation, 1695–1795 (%)9 [Place Figure 4.1 about here] Two immediate conclusions can be drawn from this data. Firstly, tax revenues grew significantly over the course of the eighteenth century even if total revenues still paled in comparison to those collected in Britain.10 Secondly, as with contemporary England customs and excise duties together comprised the greatest proportion of government income but in Ireland their relative weightings were inverted, i.e. customs revenues were much more important than their excise counterparts. This is a crucial point that we will come back to, but before doing so it is worth pointing out the other key difference between English and Irish taxation in this period. In Ireland there was no land tax. There was a brief experiment with a poll tax in the 1690s, referred to in the verse quoted above, and a land-based subsidy tax, which together yielded £290,844 over five years before being abandoned in favour of increased taxation on foreign trade.11 Opposition Irish politicians occasionally raised the spectre of a land tax but no serious attempt was made to tax Irish landowners along the same lines as their British counterparts, where the land tax at its peak contributed between a quarter and a third of total English revenues (the proportions were much less in Scotland and Wales).12 Instead the hearth tax, a one-shilling tax on every fireplace, though 109 abolished in England and Wales in 1689, was retained in Ireland and was not reformed until the 1790s.13 The difficulties faced by the Revenue Commissioners when they tried to increase hearth money receipts in line with expanding population numbers also point to the potential difficulties any attempt to introduce a land tax on the English model might have posed. Together with the revenues from quit rents charged on properties formerly confiscated by the crown the hearth tax provided a steady if unspectacular income stream for the Irish government. Much more important, however, were receipts from customs and excise duties and it is to them that we must turn to explain the patterns of growth in Irish revenue in this period. Indirect taxes in the form of customs and excise played a central role in the rise of the English fiscal state in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historians, such as John Brewer and Patrick O’Brien amongst others, have identified how increased parliamentary control of taxation, combined with greater efficiencies in the bureaucratic framework that governed and collected new taxes, played an essential role in fostering the English ‘financial revolution’ and the creation of the eighteenth- century ‘fiscal-military state’.14 In particular, Brewer has demonstrated how the excise was the dynamo that drove the fiscal military state. Recent work by Julian Hoppit has modified Brewer’s view of the excise somewhat and suggested, inter alia, that the traditional view of the English customs system as the inferior bureaucracy needs to be revisited.15 Nevertheless, the fiscal- military state model remains influential and has been effectively extended to Ireland, albeit in modified format.16 Figure 4.1 shows how from the beginning of the eighteenth century customs revenues charged on foreign trade (including the impost known as import excise) were the single most significant component of Irish government income. The gap between customs and excise revenues continued to widen apart from a brief blip in the 1740s (possibly a function of wartime 110 conditions) even as excise revenues started to increase from the 1770s onwards.17 Two questions arise. Why did the Irish excise not follow the English model, and what role did political decision making play in shaping the distinctive pattern of Irish taxation? Firstly, Ireland’s economic and demographic structure mattered. The Irish economy did not experience structural change in the way that the early modern English economy made the precocious transition from one dominated by agrarian production to one increasingly dominated by manufacturing and commerce. The Irish economy continued to be dominated by agriculture right through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, it is arguable that the increased industrialisation of the English/British economy and the consequent need for imported Irish foodstuffs to fuel this great transformation ensured Ireland did not experience structural change along the lines witnessed in its larger and much more powerful neighbour. There was consequently much less growth in Ireland in the numbers of excisable goods until the 1790s. This mattered in terms of taxation both because English real incomes rose, increasing consumer purchasing power there, and because the production of excisable goods rose to meet this consumer demand.18 As Table 4.1 demonstrates, only in the 1790s following significant changes in the Irish tax code did excise per capita see any real gains. Table 4.1: Excise Revenues and Per Capita Change, 1695–179519 [Place Table 4.1 about here] Population growth can therefore be discounted as the key factor in explaining the late eighteenth- century rise in excise revenues. To be sure, it played a role but other factors were more significant. Chief amongst these was the role of politics, what we might call the political economy of taxation. 111 The basic structures of Irish taxation were codified in the Restoration customs and excise legislation of 1662 and 1663, which laid out what duties were paid on what goods.20 The produce of these duties, together with hearth money, quit rents, and a succession of smaller charges, some of which were medieval in origin, made up what was known as the hereditary revenue.

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